Sales taxes?

In the article regarding the town council tentatively approving a $16.7 million budget, we are once again reminded how and where our tax dollars are spent and how much it costs to enjoy services.

I was surprised to learn Cave Creek takes in from $700,000 to 500,000 per year in the ½ percent sales taxes.

Many people would be surprised to learn that when they buy from on-line-only retailers, no sales taxes are collected. What you are supposed to do is keep a running total of what you purchase and report and pay those taxes due when you file your income tax. Almost no one does that and it is estimated that more than $23 billion is lost per year over this.

No one likes taxes, but if we were collecting the sale tax on all those sales made at online-only retailers we wouldn't have to ask for new taxes when special spending comes up. Additionally, think how much those lost sales means to the local economy.

Development fees

While a member of the Planning Commission, I attended a Land Use Seminar sponsored by the town’s Municipal Risk Retention Insurance Pool. If still offered, it should be mandatory for all planning commissioners. At the time, maybe 2005 or 2006, Cave Creek led all small Arizona cities and towns with land use litigation and was losing most of the cases; the risk pool was not happy with us.

At the seminar, I had the dubious pleasure of being seated with a representative from Queen Creek who felt obligated to proudly remind me how much they had grown in the past couple of years, like 30 percent or 40 percent, and Cave Creek had shown only very moderate (<3 percent) growth. She asked what the problem was. I told her we did not want runaway growth and had put in place policies to significantly slow the rate of growth. Leading the pack was a huge increase in development fees that had little to do with needing revenue and everything to do with stemming the avalanche of permit requests.

As I recall, the general thought was, if someone wanted to build in Cave Creek, they were really going to have to want to build in Cave Creek and without town subsidies. Those policies served the town well and now I read that one dim bulb councilman wants to reduce the fees “to be competitive.” Competitive with who and why?? I will tell you there may be good and valid reasons to reduce certain components of the development fees, but none of those reasons have to do with “being competitive” with respect to growth in this valley. I hope that notion is short lived.

Government waste: An example close to home

The easiest and simplest answer to the question of why government programs are wasteful and inefficient is to observe that people take care of their own stuff better than they do someone else’s stuff. (Has anyone ever washed a rental car?)

Examples close to home that I have witnessed over the last several years involve various construction projects at Encanto Park. The most recent one is remodeling the rest rooms. This is a project that should take a private owner a couple of weeks at the most.

But this remodeling at Encanto Park has been under construction for several months. During a recent walk through the park I stopped to ask the private contractor foreman about this and, not surprisingly, he said that the reason for the many delays is the micro management by the park employees and the number of changes they frequently make in the plans. This foreman confessed that these delays were so embarrassing to him that he was thinking of taking down his company’s sign on the project to preserve his reputation.

Another example at Encanto Park is the fencing that was recently put up around the perimeter. This took over two years and was a job that should have taken a month at the most. Again, a lack of proper incentives is the reason.

No park employees lose their jobs over such delays and I am sure some even get rewarded for coming up with clever ideas of changes that need to be made while construction is underway. The taxpayers have to foot the bill for these changes.

This kind of behavior is what produced the famous saying “There is no end to the amount of good you can do when you are spending someone else’s money.” Maybe it is time to privatize park management.

We must be stupid!

What are we – stupid? The Arizona State Board of Education, along with Governor Jan Brewer, and Superintendent of Public Instruction, John Huppenthal must think we are stupid.

They announced to everyone last week that Arizona children in K-12 will not be taking the PARCC academic achievement test next Spring. PARCC is one of the assessments being tested in Arizona schools that reveals how well students will pass the Common Core Academic Standards.

So let me get this straight. These same people, less than 20, in Arizona, approved of Common Core in a back room, without our legislature, in order to receive millions of dollars from the federal government in Race to the Top grant money. Now we school operators are obliged to teach your children – critical thinking, climate change, 109 steps to add two columns of addition facts, and read technical manuals, like the EPA’s manual.

We are commanded by the state to do all the above and much more, all the while we are forced to collect personal data about the family by asking the children for the information. Government is force! So far parents are not given any choice as to whether or not their child has to reveal this information. If the school does not collect this information and teach a curriculum that meets Common Core Academic Standards, it will be penalized by reducing it’s A, B, C etc. school score.

I just checked the other assessments being offered to Arizona on the Arizona Department of Education website. All of the other tests will lead us to the same watering hole as PARCC. They all will comply with Common Core. So there it is. This gang of 20 changed the name of Common Core in Arizona to Arizona’s College & Career Readiness Standards to fool the public and the parents. Now we are changing the assessment from PARCC to an equally draconian test. So if we buy this deception, then we are stupid!

The bird

Since before his installation in the White House the President has stated and shown his distaste for restrictions erected by the U.S. Constitution. In his State of the Union speech he vowed to act extra-constitutionally and went unchallenged. Our constitution limits executive, judicial and legislative actions. That mattered little; he had a pen and a phone. (Out of tiny A.C.O.R.N.s mighty Marxists grow.)

The latest ill-conceived decision violates even the law he championed. It was, as always, politically motivated, just an attention shift from the VA scandal. Bowe Bergdahl will return home in exchange for five of the most vicious terrorists on earth. Angering all but his worshipers and the Kool-Aid drinkers, he no longer cares. His unfinished agenda awaits. In the middle of his final term going through Congress is too slow and public opinion matters not at all. Beware of what he plans next. He's flipping us the bird.

The Obama Administration: Dismantling U.S. power since 2008

The infiltration is complete. And if you feel the same as we do about that – betrayed, sabotaged – and refuse to sit by while mad men endanger American citizens and dismantle our nation brick by brick, then join us as we confront this administration and work to repair the incalculable damage they have caused.

Help us as we push to regain and reassert America’s power and rein in this out of control government by demanding they once again follow the principles that define America and make this country the greatest nation in history. This is going to be a monumental task requiring everyone's dedicated effort and strongest resolve, so we ask that you contribute in whatever way you can. Sign the petition and then consider making a donation – whatever you can afford to give at specialoperationsspeaks.com.

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